| Humor at Work |
ISSUE 640 - Aug 3, 2016 |
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Job Crafting Your Way to Greater Happiness at Work |
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Yale professor Amy Wrzesniewski (rez-NESS-key) studies "job crafting" - ways that employees can shape their work to make them more meaningful. One example she cites is a university hospital where two different groups of hospital cleaners spoke about their work in strikingly different ways. One group spoke about their work in very bland
way: listing off their tasks as described in their job descriptions, saying that their jobs didn't require a lot of skill, and admitting they were only there for the money. The second group of cleaners, however, spoke of how much skill their work took and how much meaning their work gave them. Some described their work as playing the role of an ambassador.
Why the difference? Because cleaners in the second, much happier group, talked about their role in helping patients and how they performed extra tasks not listed in their job descriptions, such as moving pictures around in patients' rooms believing it might in some small way facilitate a speedier recovery.
Wrzesniewski`s research has shown that job crafting is one of the keys to greater workplace happiness, commitment, productivity, and mobility into other positions. She suggests three ways to job craft your way to a more meaningful work experience:
1. Task crafting: Change your work tasks to make the work more meaningful for you. (Think, for example, of the window washers at some children's hospitals who dress up as superheroes.)
2. Relational crafting: Change the ways you relate to other people, for example, reaching across to other teams or departments to build alliances that benefit both groups.
3. Cognitive tasking: Change how you perceive your work so you see it in a broader context and understand how your work impacts everyone around you and how it contributes to a higher purpose.
As always, I'd love to hear from you - let me know if you have an example of something you've done to be "crafty" in your own work to create more meaning and satisfaction in what you do.
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Mike's Fun at Work Tip |
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Many customer service surveys remind us of the importance of remembering and using our customers' names. It's a simple, but critical form of recognition - in fact the YMCA in New York found that welcoming their members by name when they came into a facility was the single biggest factor that influenced membership retention rates.
So why not, as some organizations have done, create a fun Customer Name Remembering contest to see who can correctly remember the most customers?
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Quote of the Week |
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"Everybody is creative given the right context." Alex Castellarnau
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It's a Wacky World |
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Do you know where to turn for safety when the zombie apocalypse arrives? According to a report by the Estately Real Estate Search, Canada's Yukon Territory is, and I quote, "The best equipped to fend of a zombie menace." The worst place to fend off a zombie attack in Canada? Poor, zombie-friendly Prince Edward Island.
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mike@mikekerr.com
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